The Rant Podcast
A bi-weekly podcast focused on pulling back the curtain on the American higher education system and breaking down the people, the policies and the politics. The podcast host, Eloy Ortiz Oakley, is a known innovator and leader in higher education. The podcast will not pull any punches as it delves into tough questions about the culture, politics and policies of our higher education system.
The Rant Podcast
If Learning Is A Commodity, What Makes College Worth It
Trust in college is slipping, yet the desire for opportunity is stronger than ever. We dig into that tension and lay out a clearer path forward: build programs around working learners, publish honest numbers, and align skills with jobs so students see—and feel—real value.
We unpack fresh survey findings showing that Americans still view higher education as a path to mobility, but frustration with cost, debt, and opaque outcomes is eroding confidence. From soaring living expenses to schedules that ignore adult realities, the experience often works against the very people it claims to serve. We talk through why earnings-only measurements are too blunt, how better data can tell a fuller story, and what it takes to communicate value before a student ever sets foot in class.
We also spotlight lessons from adult-serving institutions like UMGC and their intentional design mindset: modular pathways, flexible pacing, data-driven support, and clear connections between competencies and careers. The takeaway is practical and actionable: every offer letter should state total cost, time to completion, and typical outcomes; every program should maintain a living map between learned skills and local job demand; and every institution should treat continuous improvement as a duty to learners, not a branding exercise.
If you care about rebuilding trust in higher education, you’ll find a blueprint here for transparency, employer alignment, and many on-ramps to postsecondary success. Subscribe, share this episode with a colleague who’s ready to rethink student value, and leave a review with one change you want to see on your campus.
Hi, this is Eloy Ortiz Oakley, and welcome back to the Rant Podcast, the podcast where we pull back the curtain and break down the people, the policies, and the politics of our higher education system. In this episode, I take some time to talk about a couple of threads from my last two episodes. If you recall, a couple of episodes ago, I sat down with the president of the University of Maryland Global Campus, Greg Fowler, and we talked about the needs of working learners. That was followed up with my conversation with Sophie Nguyen from New America, where we discussed the latest varying degree survey that New America sponsors, which focuses on the attitudes of Americans with regard to higher education today. I want to dive into both of those conversations and pull some threads that I think are important for the higher education marketplace to think about right now, particularly at this time of political turmoil, erosion, and the confidence of Americans in higher education, and the enormous challenges that higher education leaders face today, and the pressures that they're experiencing as a result of the changes in the economy, the rise of AI, and the need to reimagine and redesign the way that we deliver teaching and learning. Let me begin with the conversation I had with Sophie about the Varying Degrees 2025 survey. And I bring this up because I've seen a number of surveys lately, not just this year, but over the last couple of years. Invariably, these surveys continue to tell us, to tell us as educators, as policymakers, that we are failing the American public. That Americans, by and large, continue to lose faith and confidence in the value of a higher education. Now, what we also hear them saying, and this was true in the Varying Degree Survey, is that most Americans, whether Democrat or Republican, still see a higher education as a key lever, as a ticket to the American dream, or here in California to the California dream. So they're saying multiple things all at once. They're saying that, yes, higher education is still that opportunity that they want for themselves and for their children and for future generations. But what they're also saying is that higher education today is no longer creating the value that they once believed it should. They're frustrated with the cost, the amount of debt that learners have to accumulate, the fact that many programs of study do not align with some sort of economic outcome. It's not providing the economic mobility that people once thought it did. And that it's not serving everybody equally or equitably. Now, I understand that a lot is changing today. Some of these pressures are due to the political attacks on higher education, some are due to the fact that we had this mounting debt crisis in higher education. And of course, there's been the news stories, the news stories about graduate programs that lead to no economic outcome. The fact that people are jumping into Ubers and Lyfts and having conversations with their drivers only to find out that they have a bachelor's degree, though, that they have a master's degree, but they never found work that allowed them to thrive in the economy. Some of these are anecdotal, but they keep showing up in our surveys. We here in California at College Futures, we did a survey of Californians, working-age Californians in partnership with Gallup. And much of the same themes came through there. That these working learners are frustrated with the cost, not just the cost in terms of money, but the cost in terms of the sacrifices that they have to make in order to attend a college or university that's built around the schedules of administrators and faculty, not around the schedules of the learner. They're frustrated with not only the upfront cost, but the amount of money that they have to borrow, the time it takes, and then the lack of information they get about the career choice that they're going to make and how their higher education journey aligns with that career choice. Now, don't get me wrong, this isn't the responsibility of every educator. We can't solve every ill in the economy. Here in California, we can't solve the housing crisis. We can't solve the food and security crisis. But what we can solve is designing programs of study that meet the challenges of today's learner. This is what survey after survey continues to tell us. That we as higher education leaders have not looked at the contemporary needs, the challenges that learners face today, and begin to design with those challenges in mind. And so that's an area that we at College Futures are clearly focused on. We want to change the narrative around what value means in higher education in California. And who are we creating value for? Are we creating value for the few and the fortunate that get to go to the most selective colleges and universities in the state or in the country? Or are we creating value for the majority of Californians or the majority of Americans who are working day to day trying to make a living and accessing higher education for the purpose of improving their lives and the lives of their family, loved ones, and their community? That is the trick that I think we need to conquer. Because if we don't, we're going to continue to lose the faith of the public. We already have lost it. We need to gain it back. And the only way to gain it back is to show how we create value for every learner, regardless of what program of study they're in. And I get that federal policy is now on its way. It's going to be measuring outcomes based on the earnings that a learner has post their higher education experience. And that might be a blunt instrument. It's then incumbent upon us to create better measures, to work with our states, to work with our communities, to access data that helps us to tell a better picture of what's happening with learners, and to show that partnerships with employers, with regions, with communities can produce better economic outcomes, better economic mobility for the learners that we're serving. And to open up the tent to more learners, regardless of what their backgrounds are, regardless of what their learning styles are, create opportunities that meet those learners where they're at. And so that allows me then to pivot to my conversation with Greg Fowler. And as I said in that interview, UMGC or WGU or a Southern New Hampshire or an Arizona State University hasn't conquered every problem that learners face. But what they do provide for us is a window into intentional design. Intentionality with regards to actually going out and talking to learners, understanding from the data that they share with us what their challenges are, what their needs are, using data to better understand what interventions will help that individual learner improve and succeed. Not just what's happening in a classroom, a classroom of perhaps 40 or 400 learners, but getting down to the individual level and doing that with intentionality. What sets these universities apart from our traditional colleges and universities in the country is that they have been forced to intentionally design around the needs of those learners. And now they are benefiting from that. And learners are benefiting from that experience as well. They have a better idea of how their learning interacts with and supports their economic goals. It provides data to the institution, to the faculty, on what kind of earnings that learner is gaining from the program of study they just participated in. And if there is no gain, it gives information to the faculty, to the university, to the college on how to improve that. This is not an issue of pointing fingers. This is an issue of continuous improvement, creating value. Again, I go back to this notion of creating value, intentionally creating value. And value does exist as well outside of the economic returns. Improve health outcomes, improve participation in civic life. All those things create value. But the lead into this comes from the surveys that we continue to hear from learners in the field. That the number one reason they go to college is to improve their economic outcome. The number one reason that they don't go to college, or the number one reason that they stop out of college, as was the case in the Gallup survey here in California, is because of cost. So this notion about the economics of higher education, the economics of post-secondary programs of study, are really about how it interacts with the learner, how the learner sees the value of what they're getting. They are paying money, folks, and they should understand what they're paying for. We in higher education, we have become the least transparent industry in America. Think about it. When you enroll in a program of study, what information do you get about the money that you're paying for access to that program of study? Very little. When you buy a car, there's an MSRP. When you buy a product, there's the product description, what the cost is, what you should expect from the product. And I'm not saying that higher education is a product, but learning is becoming a commodity. I can open up my YouTube channel, I can go to Skillshare, I can go to any one of a number of upskilling platforms and learn a new skill within a few days. Learning is becoming a commodity. It's available on my phone, on my computer. I can go to Perplexity or to Gemini or any AI platform that you use and get information in an instant. I can ask it to help teach me a new language. So again, what we in higher education deliver is value that lasts a lifetime. We need to be able to articulate that better. We need to be able to demonstrate that better. And we need to give more and better information to the learner. And in this case, the learner is the consumer. We need to take lessons from other industries, be more transparent every time we send a letter of acceptance, making it clear what they're expected to pay, how long it's expected that they will go through their program of study, and how long should it take for them to pay back their investment. And then stand behind it as educators, making sure that we are communicating with the employment community, making sure that we're keeping track of how the skills that learners obtain in their programs of study articulate to the skills that employers are demanding in the workforce. This is a continuous loop. We will never be perfect at it, but we have to continue to practice it, continue to improve. Because guess what, folks? The workforce, changes in the economy, changes in this world are happening at faster and faster speeds. So I hope that you enjoyed my last two episodes, my conversation with Greg Fowler about how UMGC designs around working learners, and then the conversation I had with Sophie Nguyen about what Americans are saying about higher education today, and use that information to go back to our classrooms, to go back to our institutions, to go back to our state capitals, our policy discussions, our conversations on the street, and begin to change the narrative around higher education. Begin to open up the tent to many pathways toward a post-secondary education, not less, creating more value for more people and in more places. That's the way that we are going to reimagine the California dream here in my great state. And that's the way that we are going to redesign the American dream for every American, regardless of their background. Thanks for joining me, everybody, here on The Rant. If you're enjoying these episodes, please hit subscribe. If you're listening to us on your favorite audio podcast platform, download our episodes, uh, follow us, subscribe, and continue to give us great comments and any suggestions that you have about future guests. Thanks for joining us, everybody, and we'll see you all again soon.
